Vocal cues and children's mental representations of narratives: Effects of incongruent cues on story comprehension

An experiment investigated the influence of vocal intonation on children's processing of explicit and implicit text concepts. Children at two age levels (5 & 7 year olds) listened to narratives in which the story characters’ affective tones were either consistent or inconsistent with story content. The children's comprehension of the narratives was assessed through a cued recall, recognition, and free recall task. Overall, the discrepant cues tended to affect children's processing of implicit but not explicit text material. Several age level differences were also observed. The cues influenced the older but not the younger children's speed of processing implicit information. On the other hand, vocal intonation affected the younger but not the older children's appraisals of story outcome. It was speculated that young children assign more weight to vocal information in making assessments of story outcome than do older children.